82
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 5, 2016
Dorrance's tomboy energy departs from the controlled cool of classical tap.
DANCING
HAPPY FEET
Michelle Dorrance is a new kind of tap dancer.
BY JOAN ACOCELLA
ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY
T deal in tap is Michelle
Dorrance, whose troupe, Dorrance
Dance, has just completed a run at the
Joyce. Dorrance, who is thirty-seven, is
a girl from North Carolina whose back-
story might have been written by a press
agent. Her mother, M'Liss Gary Dor-
rance, a ballet dancer (she performed in
Eliot Feld's first company), founded and
directed the Ballet School of Chapel
Hill. Her father, Anson Dorrance, cur-
rently the women's soccer coach at the
University of North Carolina, led the
U.S. women's soccer team to the World
Cup in . Put those two together,
and you sort of get a tap dancer.
Dorrance discovered early on that she
was a natural. When she was nine, she
was in an advanced tap class with eighteen-
year-olds. She joined the North Carolina
Youth Tap Ensemble, and from there
went on to other companies. She also
took time out to get a B.A. at N.Y.U. and
spent four years as one of the drum-
mer-dancers in " ." In , she
founded her own company and began
making work for it. The awards soon
started rolling in, capped, last year, by a
MacArthur Fellowship. It isn't every day
that a tap dancer gets a MacArthur.
Dorrance is a new kind of tapper. Clas-
sically, tap is a matter of a cool, contained
upper body suspended over a huge clat-
ter down below---a contrast that is sup-
posed to be witty and, in a great or even
good tapper, is. ("My feet are producing
twenty taps a second, in alternating
rhythms? Gee, I didn't notice.") Dorrance
supplies plenty of action in the feet, but
meanwhile the rest of the body is all over
the place. Her elbows fly out; so do her
knees, in great, lay-an-egg squats. She
looks like a happy little tomboy vaulting
around in a tree. Now and then, she'll put
on the mood-indigo, darkness-in-my-
soul expression sometimes seen in tap-
pers, or, alternatively, the Vegas-y let-me-
entertain-you expression, but both of them
fall o her face pretty fast, because she is
fundamentally una ected. Last October,
she appeared on Stephen Colbert's show---
you can see it on YouTube---to teach him
some steps. With no smirking, she got
this big, besuited man to do the shim
sham. He even seemed pleased with his
performance. In any case, she was pleased,
and completely relaxed.
In "The Blues Project," the show at
the Joyce, Dorrance wears a blue-and-
white checked cotton dress with two big
pockets in the front, the sort of thing you
might wear to sit on the porch and shell
peas. When performing, she often gath-
ers her long hair in a topknot that slowly
migrates to one side or the other as the
evening progresses. She is the one thing
no other professional tap dancer has ever
been: dorky.
Her good spirits appear to have had a
huge e ect on her company, and this, even
more than her tapping, may be her great
glory. Tap dancers are always telling you
how grateful they are to their predeces-
sors and to those currently working in the
field. There is a reason for this---histori-
cally, no important area of dance has been
less carefully documented---but after a
while it all starts to sound a little goody-
goody. Dorrance is no exception. In the
program for "The Blues Project,"her whole
"artist's statement" is a hymn of praise to
Toshi Reagon, her composer-accompanist,
and to her two choreographic collabora-
tors, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and
Derick K. Grant. She goes further, though:
Sumbry-Edwards and Grant are listed
with her, in the same line of type, as the
show's choreographers.
In this, Dorrance may be observing
something more than professional cour-
tesy. She's clearly sensitive to the fact that
she is a white artist receiving great ac-
claim in a traditionally African-Ameri-
can department of dance. (Sumbry-
Edwards and Grant, like most of the cast,
are black.) And in practical terms she has
no doubt noticed what she gets by spread-
ing the wealth around. Her nine dancers
(that's including her) are like the seven